An Op-ed in today’s NY Times comes from Jennifer Finney Boylan.
Boylan was male when he entered into a heterosexual marriage in 1988 but has since become legally female, at least in her home state of Maine. The marriage continues: “Deedie stood by me, deciding that her life was better with me than without me … the things that she loved in me have mostly remained the same, and that our marriage, in the end, is about a lot more than what genders we are, or were.”
Her op-ed piece offers a fresh perspective on the issue of gay marriage and the silliness of attempting to define marriage according to gender or even attempting to define gender itself. “How do we define legal gender? By chromosomes? By genitalia? By spirit? By whether one asks directions when lost?”
Elizabeth Kaeton comments on the article in her blog, Telling Secrets. Kaeton says she confronts her own sexism and internalized homophobia and that “transsexuals, as a group, continue to be maligned among some LGBT people as well as the heterosexual community. They make us uncomfortable. They challenge us to change traditional understandings of gender, relationships, why, even marriage!”
Both the original Op-ed piece and Kaeton’s blog post are worth reading.
